CHICAGO — After about one year of planning, the Advertising Specialty Institute® (ASI) launched its new comprehensive learning platform during ASI Show Chicago 2025, which ran July 22–24 at McCormick Place.
The ASI Learning Network — which features on-demand, interactive education experiences in areas such as sales, marketing and technology — was unveiled to about 5,000 attendees. The launch included an education session describing how the platform works, live demonstrations in ASI’s booth and videos that played during various sessions throughout the show. While it’s too soon to tell exactly what the long-term impression of the new platform will be, according to Andy Cohen, ASI’s Senior Vice President of Events, Media and Marketing Services, the reception on the show floor was positive.
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“We’ll know more in the next few months as we get into usage statistics, but anecdotally, onsite in Chicago, we had a really nice reaction,” Cohen said. “People in our market are starving for information and educational content. They’re really looking for ways to target new markets, sell new products coming out in our industry or use AI and social media.”
Feeding the Craving for Learning
Education is nothing new to ASI, but the organization — which caters to suppliers, distributors and decorators in the promotional products industry — found that the learning experience was not as robust as it could have been. The ASI Learning Network was created to remedy that issue and serve as an elevated experience that best positions members for success.
“We have had educational efforts for many years, but our prior education platform was pretty static. It was really just YouTube videos that were housed on a website, so it was not very interactive and not as robust as we would like,” Cohen said. “One of the missions that we have with our members is to help them be successful. Our audience now has access to dozens of interactive courses that they can take on their own time. Courses are not just somebody speaking to you; They also have some interactive quizzes and elements that make them more engaging than what we had before.”
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Members will be able to access new content in ASI’s Learning Network on a weekly basis and the organization aspires to have hundreds of courses available, so users can learn new information they can apply to their businesses on a regular basis. ASI Show Chicago 2025 was the perfect place to introduce this new membership benefit.
“Now we can extend a little bit from the Chicago show energy, so anybody who was there and saw our Learning Network can now take that home and have similar experiences on their own in their office by interacting with this new product,” Cohen said.
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